March 2005 archives

Knowing what keeps your spiritual lamp lit
(USING YOUR SWORD WHILE KEEPING YOUR LAMPS FULL)

Each person connects with Christ uniquely. He has unique ways of meeting with each of us, depending on how He made us. For me there is sort of prophetic streaming song until I feel I am in and with Him; for others it is taking a walk alone in nature; for others it is dancing into His Presence. All can be acts of worship, but each can also be unique.

I think that God is stressing that we know the ways we connect with Him individually--our unique ways of meeting Him. it seems that as things get darker and more turbulent, we need to be able to find our meeting places more quickly and regularly. We need to know how we keep our spiritual lamps lit, so we can be with those five wise virgins.

There are many ways to figure out how you meet with God. It tends to be the things which jazz your spirit when you are doing them. For me it is often prophecying to strangers. But for others, it may be getting a new insight or understanding about His word or history itself. We need to know and notice what jazzes our spirit’s! And be able to get to that meeting activity quickly and often. To stay in His Presence is becoming something of a mandate presently! We no longer have the luxury of waiting for huge gatherings or fountain experiences. We need to walk with and in His Presence daily!

I have friends who get jazzed by taking fast walks and listening to Him talking to them about what they see. Others need to tell people about who Jesus is to feel spiritually alive; still others, need a deep beholding of other people to feel like they are fully in His Presence. It matters less what it is that gets us jazzed (although it does offer us hints about what our true identities are!), than that we enter into that space with Him daily and often.

Many people know their swords but don’t know how to keep their torch or lamps lit. They, in other words, know how to use their unique gifts and weapons, but don’t know how to stay spiritually full while they are in active everyday life. We need both, the lamp and the sword to survive in effulgency in these days! The two are related however.

We tend to have a sword in the area where we have a lamp. That is we have authority in the area where we are most spiritually awake or lit up. For example, I like to tell people what I hear God saying to them in the moment. That activity jazzes my spirit; it also is part of my sword, and so can cut into the spirit of another person and offer them God’s current words for them. Knowing my sword helps me know what keeps my lamp full. Lots of people have not figured out how to keep their lamps lit, and so when they use their swords, they get empty fast, running out of spiritual steam after using their sword or ministering. The truth is keeping our lamps full, helps us use our swords without getting spiritually exhausted.

when we haven’t seen His beauty in a while, we fall
for any passing pleasure, and then
we turn back
to leaf,
coming down and kissing window in early
spring winds, and we are
reminded again of His realm
of daily revelations.

this particular leaf lands unexpectantly still
on my window seal
today, in the midst of such warm storms.
i think the warmth itself has something in waiting
to teach me of You, oh
Lord of and in
all creation
keep me seeing You
in all
that passes by my window
keep me still enough to hear
you in falling of single leaf
from such unseen distances

Suffering in and with...and then, into His resurrection

Suffering with Jesus doesn’t mean to suffer FOR Him, but to see Him suffering and be willing to join in His Labour--to suffer WITH Him. Jesus is working very hard right now, and is feeling the increased assaults of darkness in Himself. As the one who sustains all life, He is with us always. “Yes, I am with you always until the end.” He has promised to be with us.

He spoke this, because He knew it would be hard to feel Him with us as darkness increases around us. God has been showing me Psalm 13 as a model of how to stay with Jesus while feeling surrounded constantly by increasing darkness. The feeling in the early part of this song, is that God is far from us. It is basically, Jesus on the cross, and that feeling He had. And it is into this side of Him we enter as we start to fellowship with His sufferings. Again, it does not mean to suffer for Jesus, but to suffer with and as He IS suffering. He is being striped and wounded still, and as we see this, we are motivated to be with Him in this.

As we start to LIVE more IN His Presence constantly, we will feel and see more of His pain; this participating in His death is the path and entryway to entering His resurrection as well. Jesus is constantly overcoming, as we enter this part of His ongoing overcoming, we become overcomers--this is part of what is meant by the verse about us overcoming “by His Blood”. This is to say, that we enter His very life which is overcoming in order to overcome. It is not by spiritual practices, but by entering the very life of Christ, and specifically, the parts which are overcoming darkness, that we too become overcomers.

In these past few months, The Lord has been speaking to me about overcoming and overcomers. All overcoming is a matter of streaming INTO and OUT OF His Life itself. It is not just tactics we “do”, but a Life we enter into and move out from. Jesus is the only real overcomer. We join Him in His overcoming by entering this part of His Life!

“The word of their testimony” is The Holy Spirit testifying about Jesus through us. As we dwell in the ark of His Presence, His Spirit bears constant testimony to Him.

“Not loving their lives unto death” speaks of a willingness for martyrdom, but also a willingness to be in the part of Him which is dead unto life--meaning, our souls cannot overcome the fear of death or anything else apart from Him. We must stay in the place of death in relation to ourselves, and to be wearing or inside of His Life.

THE ARKs

The ark of Noah is a type of many things. Among them, it represents the place where His Life dwelt to preserve our lives. Noah and his family were preserved because God made an ark of His Presence to dwell within as the dark flood waters covered the entire earth. We are living in days like Noah’s!

And He is still using this method of making a ark for His indwelling. This ark is now in His People, but it will become the only safe place on earth, and it will be clear what floats above water as the times move on.

The darkness will cover the earth even as His Spirit is poured out. In the end, the dove will be sent out and find the olive stem, and hope will be restored as the darkness subsides and a restored earth emerges. Jesus will reign at that time, and the nations will be set again in order and everything in its proper place.

Now, however, the waters are rising, and the ark is being built. We must become an ark of His dwelling in order to float during this season. Any of our practices or programs which do not actually include the Presence of Christ, won’t float in this season.

WE NEED TO BE THE ONES WHO SEE WHAT IS COMING

“But you brethren, are not in darkness, so that this Day should not overtake you as a thief...
..Therefore let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch and be self-controlled”
Paul in his letter to the thessalonians (chapter 5)

This hour is not to come like a thief to those in the Light. To be in the Light is to have understanding. Light=sight and understanding. Jesus is Himself The Light. The increase of darkness is occuring, and we should be the ones who see it coming--ones who have and live in Light. For Christ is speaking in and to His people about the things we are seeing right now on earth, interpreting them and giving us a clear understanding.

We are in an hour of high alert. Our daily lives, and our nights. David said the day proclaims, and the night pours forth knowledge. There is not an hour when His Presence is not speaking to us, and urging us into deeper communion. This constant ongoing being IN Him, is the practice of those who are being built to overcome the increasing darkness of our hour on earth. He is one with The Father, and we are one with Him. As we abide, we come to live and breath in His House or Very Self. Jesus wants to dwell with us more constantly. He yearns for everyone to hear and be with and in Him in this hour.

As things march forward, the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world are coming into a more stark contrast. This is God’s final act of Mercy to show all mankind the clear choice it must make between His Kingdom and the world’s.
Paul opens a picture up in this passage. He tells us that those in the light--sons of light--should know what is coming and so not be swept away. Those in the dark cannot see, but we are not in the dark, but in the light--so let us not not “sleep” or release ourselves into a restful position in darkness, but in contrast stay in the alertness of love and faith in the light; having the hope of knowing who Jesus is, and how He saves people from darkness as a helmet. He is contrasting two places to rest within. One is a release which still has alertness and life; the other is without sight and more like drunkenness--ie lacking in clarity and discernment.

We are to have discernment (Lord release it!). We are to see clearly what is coming, and like the virgins, stay lit. In this we are all to be prophetic, for we are sons and daughters of light. In scriptures, light has to do with (among other things) understanding. So Paul is saying, we should be ones who have sight and understanding of the things which are coming on earth, and be prepared.

Let us not sleep in the way that others sleep--ie in darkness! But let us be resting in Light, alert and discerning. Paul ends by saying that whether we wake or sleep, we are to do so together with Him. Where can I flee from His presence. All of our daily cycles are lived in The Light of who Christ IS.

...listening to the Waterboys, recalling recent travels into scotland--the lush hiddenness of God, the unseen stretches, and mossy caverns of His Being. So much spiritual terrain to know and be seen. God loves to be BEheld, to be encountered...and so many parts; having just returned from the apalachian foothills near my birthplace, so similar in inner meaning to scotland, but with more of the openness of America and her identity..
this gathering, a creative boundary expansion, internally; God's pleasure at having room to breath and dwell through unfettered us. His choice to breath through us, and place His very BEing within us, for His own pleasure----I GIVE MYSELF TO YOU, my Beloved..and the oaks, and laurels agree, whispering yes...

how each season, and single tree is a teaching streaming from His Being, telling us of His nuances and hidden cadences. How could we not love God, this grand source, so subtle, dynamic...
and then the meditation of God through people--friends. Got to see stephen roach and all the good people at Place of the Heart; and to travel again, with our dear friends Brian and Whitney. Our journeys themselves as a way of entering His unfolding. Even with all our difficulties and bumps! God found through His People, through the land, through the nations---seeing Him through all things! Scraping until His traces come forth, and the contours of His Being shine through these fluidic frames aging like whiskey on the north sea!

piece of the appalachian hills, the mountain stream songs of formed and unformed communities of friends and color and son---the carolinas; and then the vastness of Texas sky; the grand fathering of the horizon--the endless vision of Texas; the power, and bigness of His Being---home, big topped, alive, hopeful--the majesty of juniper and sage raw Judah landscape--the mediterranean olive scents of hillcountry in the southwest of America--home. places we KNOW and are known by God. familiar and unfamiliar streams of being

the animal kingdom came alive last night as we drove into Texas; thoughts of each creature as a teaching, and expression of His being--the wild foxes, and hares, the strange grasp of arkansas hawks, the wierdness of lizard and frog; God in His expansion stretches to imagine the stars themselves--to tell stories int he sky. We saw a vast drama in the sunset last night; a huge dragon like creature swooping down on a soft pastel landscape, and running into a solid purple cliff of clouds...thinking of a people who would sit and interpret the skies daily...how Christ is in every event and turning...trusting, trusting...He, the center of the branch of Being itself! Us, his adventurers, finding him in the truck stops of america, the gales of scotland, the eyes of friends...this ongoing, this loving, this tale written in heaven!

Spring breezes, early summer sage hints..reading war books, and travel jounals. So many good friends with the right compass of Christ, all of us still being made whole, but on our paths; sun as the source of our energy, effecting the earth in a different way than oily inner things. Aerating, letting light and fresh wind into all the rooms of our houses; faces weary from holding, from standing with little felt support, come out onto our porches and remember the songs of Zion which keep us connected by hope of Spring. Spring reading--book of Joshua, still the best end times map for my money! Tells the whole story--levites and warriors marching into the land before the general army of the Body--already being given His Inheritance in so many fields. Wells untapped, uncapped, and in before unseen and unexpected spaces water distilled over time suddenly made available.
Spirit of understanding, Wisdom Himself alighting in our heart's tree, the larger metaphores explained--relationship between Jews and Gentile coming into clarity. Even unity suddenly looking possible...and then this song, with a screen door gently carressing the night..this song of healing deliverance, and hope returning after long winter vows.
Who can stop Him from marching into His Own land, who can stop Spring from coming?!